Article
Regional Variation in Gravel Riverbed Mobility, Controlled by Hydrologic Regime and Sediment Supply
Geophysical Research Letters
(2018)
Abstract
The frequency and intensity of riverbed mobility are of paramount importance to the inhabitants of river ecosystems as well as to the evolution of bed surface structure. Because sediment supply varies by orders of magnitude across North America, the intensity of bedload transport varies by over an order of magnitude. Climate also varies widely across the continent, yielding a range of flood timing, duration, and intermittency. Together, the differences in sediment supply and hydroclimate result in diverse regimes of bed surface stability. To quantitatively characterize this regional variation, we calculate multidecadal time series of estimated bed surface mobility for 29 rivers using sediment transport equations. We use these data to compare predicted bed mobility between rivers and regions. There are statistically significant regional differences in the (a) exceedance probability of bed‐mobilizing flows (W* > 0.002), (b) maximum bed mobility, and (c) number of discrete bed‐mobilizing events in a year.
Keywords
- Gravel river,
- Ecohydrology,
- Sediment transport,
- Bed mobility
Disciplines
- Geology,
- Geomorphology and
- Climate
Publication Date
April 16, 2018
DOI
10.1002/2017GL076747
Publisher Statement
©2018. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
Citation Information
Pfeiffer, A. M., and N. J. Finnegan (2018) Regional variation in river bed mobility, controlled by hydrologic regime and sediment supply. Geophysical Research Letters, 45, 3097-3106. doi: 10.1002/2017GL076747